


Eddys in the Seas of Time

by dixiehellcat



Series: Tony Stark Bingo 2020 [6]
Category: Dolittle (2020), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Gen, Lily Dolittle Lives, Multiverse Shenanigans, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Pepperony Bingo 2020, Pirates, Portals, Reunions, Sent to Another Dimension, Silver Fox Tony, Tony Stark Bingo 2020, Tony Stark Lives, WARNING: Herein Lie Spoilers, idk them, the Russos whomst, wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:40:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23486965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dixiehellcat/pseuds/dixiehellcat
Summary: An adventurer falls through a portal into another universe, and Tony Stark may be the only one who can help her return home.Fill for Tony Stark Bingo, card 3028, fill S4 'sent to a different dimension', spring 2020AND Pepperony Bingo prompt 'Silver Fox Tony' spring 2020
Relationships: John Dolittle/Lily Dolittle, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Series: Tony Stark Bingo 2020 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1765129
Comments: 23
Kudos: 87
Collections: Pepperony Bingo 2020, Tony Stark Bingo, Tony Stark Bingo 2020





	Eddys in the Seas of Time

**Author's Note:**

> Finally finished another prompt. In all fairness, I did not expect this bit to balloon into a freaking novella. lolol. Teen rating for a bit of language, because Tony does cuss, you know. <3
> 
> In honor of RDJ’s birthday, I present a crossover that merges his two most recent characters! yes, Tony Stark meets Dolittle. WARNING, herein lie major, MAJOR spoilers for Dolittle. If you have not seen it yet, you might want to wait until you do, though I'm pretty sure it would make sense anyhow. If you were not planning to see it, I highly recommend it. It is a hoot, and just the combination of lighthearted silliness and unexpected moments of emotion that we need more of, right now. (Critics? idk no stinkin’ critics.)
> 
> ETA, I know the plural of 'eddy' is 'eddies' but if I spelled it that way it looked like one should expect multiple versions of Venom's bf, so I used an older and less accepted spelling. Just thought I'd mention that, since somebody asked if it was intentional or not. Yes, yes it was. lol

The storm appeared out of nowhere and lashed the ship without mercy. Lily Dolittle had no way to tell where they were, other than they were off course, far out into the Atlantic. Out of reflex, she clasped her hands, her fingers reaching for the ring that was no longer there. Polynesia, dear wise Poly, would wing her way home, however long it took, and take it, and certain word of Lily’s fate, to the man who could speak to parrots and all other animals, the man she loved more than her life. At least she wouldn’t be one of those names whose loves hoped uselessly for years with no certainty. John would know she was lost at sea; he could grieve and then move on—

A mighty wave struck the ship broadsided. Sailors shouted and clung to every fitting within reach. Lily grabbed for a swinging rope, but missed, and the wave flung her over the side, her cry lost in the tumult. As the foam swept over her head and she was sucked down into a whirlpool, she had just enough sense left to think _if John were here, he’d try to talk to the fishes, that lovely fool. I love you, my dear._

Eyes squeezed shut against the stinging spray, she held her breath until she could hold it no longer. Her lungs gasped, knowing she would draw in nothing but salt water that would end her life. Instead, she inhaled air, damp but clear, with an odd smoky quality. She opened her eyes and found herself bobbing around like a discarded cork in a calm sea under a cheerful sun. A blink and a squint showed some flotsam around her, though nowhere near the amount of wreckage that should have come with a ship’s demise. 

She swam to the nearest floating object, a piece of a provision crate, hung on and threw her sodden hair back, then took a good look around. Nothing was within eyeshot. It seemed she had survived her ship going down around her, the loss of her good men and women, only to perish out here. She grumbled some choice words her father would have scolded her roundly for using, then summoned her courage. For the moment, Lily was alive. She was the daughter of a pirate king, and did not intend to hand her life over to the sea without a fight. Her attempts to triangulate her position met with no success, though; her pocket watch was waterlogged, and she had no sextant nor map. Even trying to read the waters yielded only the information she had already figured out: she was nowhere near any land. Parched and weary, she slipped into a daze, only rousing long enough to lash herself to the crate with her now tattered sash.

When next she returned to herself, Lily felt the blessed comfort of a ship’s deck rocking beneath her. Had she dreamt the whole ordeal? No, she heard unfamiliar voices around her, all male, a couple speaking the queen’s English, others speaking Spanish. Despite being favored by the queen, co-holder of a royal estate, she tensed reflexively; old habits died hard for a pirate child. The English speakers had odd flat accents—American, she thought after listening for a minute as she lay still—and spoke quietly about cargo and schedules. The Spanish speakers were closer, as though gathered around her, and their conversation was about her: who she was, where she had come from. At least they weren’t complaining about her clothing. She grew so weary of hearing men complain when she wore trousers. It was nonsense to expect her to captain a ship or explore a jungle in petticoats.

A hand made the mistake of touching her leg, in entirely too familiar a manner, and Lily reacted with the speed and ferocity of a black widow spider. Her eyes popped open and she rolled, one hand going without thought for one of the knives stowed on her person at all times. She had expected a circle of swords, maybe a musket among them, but no one held a weapon. In fact, the man she pegged as having touched her was holding nothing more than a box of medical supplies. The group of men all broke out talking at the same time, both anxious and impressed by her reaction, a rare and appreciated thing. A glance around, and Lily realized one very important and frightening fact: this was no ship of the line from Britain, Spain, America, or anyplace else. The machinery spread around the deck was a level of technology she had never seen. 

“Calm down!” the medic ordered. “You’re scarin’ her. She may not even speak Spanish.”

“I do,” she answered him in kind, slowly sheathing her blade. Following pirate instinct, she stayed with that tongue, noting startled and stern looks from the white men in uniforms standing across the deck. Common folk, she had always found, knew more and were less judgmental. No need to let them know she spoke half a dozen languages and understood more. “What ship is this, may I ask? Mine broke up in the storm.”

The men looked puzzled. “Been no storms out this way for weeks, _mamacita_ ,” one stocky man said. “And it’s for sure you haven’t been out here that long. You’re just banged up a bit.”

“Yes, well, I was tossed around a mite…” She let them tend to her minor wounds, and listened as they spoke. She asked a few questions, and avoided theirs as much as possible, until she could determine into whose hands she had fallen. That question grew more urgent when she asked where they were bound. The man who had first spoken pulled from the pocket of his odd-looking but sturdy trousers what seemed at first to be a slate, though too tiny to write upon. He laid a finger on its face, and it began to glow. Pirates were not religious as a rule, nor put much stock in things they could not see daily, but for a moment of pure panic, Lily thought _I have been taken by the bloody fae._

The wielder of the device turned it around and held it out to her. On the glass, an image had appeared: a map, she realized as she bent for a closer look. Her minders reacted too, though not with the shock she strove to veil. “Carlos!” one jibed. “How’d you get a Starkphone? I know they aren’t crazy expensive, but all your pay goes to your fam.”

“My cousin got a new one,” Carlos responded in kind. “Gave me this one. I really want that latest model, with the holographic projector, but this’ll do for now. See, _senorita,_ the blinking dot on this satellite map, that’s us.”

Lily had no idea what half the things they had named were, but she could still read a chart, and it showed she was somehow farther off course than any storm had a right to have carried her. For pity’s sake, they were almost to America! Before she could ask more questions, though, she saw something else on the image, something that made her thoughts chug to a stop and her blood run cold as an Arctic winter. “There in the corner…is that today’s date?” she forced out.

Carlos nodded, then looked into her face, and his was suddenly overtaken with a look of impossible understanding. “Fuck,” he said. “Of course! You blipped, didn’t you?” She frowned, even more confused, and feeling embarrassingly faint. Instantly, rough but gentle hands were helping her to sit and put her head between her knees. While she breathed and tried to regain her composure, a spirited debate ensued. “You guys know not everybody got returned where they were when they went, right?” Carlos said.

“Uh, Carlos, my fuckin’ sister got blipped,” another man retorted. “I know all about this shit. She was on a plane, and came back to our airport at home.”

“Yeah, but there’s stories going around that a few people got dropped in weird-ass places,” a third put in, “and some of ‘em was so disoriented, they didn’t know who they was or nothin’.”

“That’s bullshit,” the man who had spoken of his sister—Angel, she thought his name was—growled. “I only heard one story like that, and it was some guy ditched his fam and then went back to ‘em and claimed he got blipped.”

“Well, my cousin—not the one with the phone, another one—he was in jail with this guy who claims he knows the Avengers, and he said—”

“ _Carlos_ ,” Angel groaned, “you know Luis don’t know shit ‘bout no Avengers.”

“He said,” Carlos continued, blithely ignoring the japes of his comrades, “folks didn’t always know what’d happened to ‘em, and some of ‘em did have trouble rememberin’.”

Lily let the talk wash over here as she struggled with the horrible but obvious truth. The machinery was so advanced, the people so strange, because not only had the unearthly storm thrown her a long way off course physically, but in time. The date on the tiny screen read 2023, nearly two hundred years after her own. She had dreaded knowing John would have to go on without her. Instead, he had lived, and died, and she was left alone in an unimaginable future.

The crew of the ship, the _Rickman_ , concluded she was one of what they called the Blipped, and she did nothing to disabuse them of the notion. Once they shared their revelation with the ship’s master and his officers, those worthies were, if more reserved, equally kind. She held her peace and allowed them to believe she spoke only Spanish, for now, but she greedily absorbed everything her new friends had to say, as they steamed toward their next port of call at a frankly alarming speed. She was an explorer, after all, and for all the ache and loss that tore at her, this was the most incredible adventure any voyager had ever set forth on. John was—John had been a man of science, and had she let this slip by her, he would have risen from his grave to scold her. His grave—she could not bear that thought, and so thrust it from her. Instead, she listened to stories of families and homelands, and the tale of how a warlord from—another planet, how was that even possible?—had wiped out half the population, until a band of heroes had restored them and destroyed the villain. 

Two days later, the _Rickman_ raised New York harbor. Lily was both eager and nervous facing this strange new world. “Never been to a big city before, huh?” Carlos, who had taken her under his wing. asked genially. “There’s an agency downtown, that helps blipped people get reunited with their peeps. You got your papers?” She must have looked as puzzled as she felt; what sort of papers did one need just to land? “You know, passport, work auth, whatever. They’ll be expired, course, but they got allowances for that too, I hear….Ohhh, I get it. You, you don’t got no papers, do ya? You didn’t have none.” She shook her head, suddenly afraid. “Don’t worry, _chica_ , I gotcha covered. You stick with me.”

New York City was bigger and louder and busier and taller, just more in every possible way, than she could have imagined. For a moment, she wanted to run and hide in the farthest corner of the ship’s hull, but Carlos escorted her out into bustling streets populated by folk of every possible stripe. With amazing ease, he navigated through crowds and past masses of more machinery—carriages that whizzed by with no horse in sight, ear-splitting mechanisms used by laborers building lofty towers, and once, unbelievably, a motorized suit of armor flying through the air, greeted by whoops and cheers from passers-by. 

By the time Carlos ushered her to a seat in a railway car sleeker than anything she had ever seen, she was overwhelmed. Her head was so a-spin that, if ruffians saw fit to set upon her now, she was not at all sure she could fight them off. Other than a few pouty lads, however, no one seemed to take the least notice of her and her companion. She sat and had a look about; in her experience, folk scowled or clucked with disapproval when they saw her stroll freely in her trousers or ride a train unattended by a man, but here, many females were alone or in small groups, dressed in every possible style, and seemed supremely unperturbed. It was a heartening sight, she had to admit.

Carlos led her to a neat small lodging in a neighborhood he called Sunset Park, and presented her to his wife, Consuela. Whatever he explained under his breath while Lily was washing up, the other woman welcomed her with open arms. “We know people,” she assured Lily. “We will help you.”

The benevolent people were as good as their word. Lily was educated about the need for documentation for any travel, and gifted within a few days with well-made false identification (quite a pirate-like thing, she thought) in the name Lilia Islanio. She wore hand-me-down clothing, worn but clean, and bedded down on Carlos and Consuela’s divan, shared with a couple of cats (John would have been pumping them for all the household gossip in minutes, she thought sadly) and three rambunctious children. Lily had not been exposed to young children much, but she did not dislike them; she found herself enjoying them more the more time she spent as a temporary live-in nanny of sorts, and a tutor when she admitted she did speak English.

She kept her head down, as every pirate child learned from the cradle to do: flying below the radar, Carlos called it. Her days were spent learning her way around this wild new century: how to follow road signs and avoid being flattened by vehicles, how to pay fare on the ‘subway’, and how to purchase wares from the countless shops large and small. The children appointed themselves her teachers and tour guides to show her every little thing about New York (and secretly, about the twenty-first century).

The place she loved best, of course, was the library. Joey, Consuela’s eldest, insisted their branch was small, but Lily could not imagine a place larger or more full of books of all kinds! She could have moved the worn divan in there and made it her home. And then, there was this thing called a computer, and through it, access to the sum total, it seemed, of all human knowledge: the internet. She learned to use it, and was off and running. 

She figured out what credit cards were, and how folk relied on modern banks to manage their coin, then made her way to the Diamond District. There, a sharp-eyed old Jew (she did not call him that, since she had also learned that in this day and age, it was ill-mannered to call anyone out by creed or bloodline) looked over some of the gems she had kept sewn in her garments for emergencies, and paid her pretty handsomely for them. It was a start. A part of her still missed her wedding ring; she could never have sold it unless the choice were that or starve, but having something of John’s with her would have bucked her up.

Lily tucked the money carefully into the fine-looking reticule she had purchased from a street vendor, and started back for Sunset Park, to ask her friends’ recommendation of a reputable bank to safeguard her funds. Angel’s cousin Elena worked at a pet shop that was in need of help, and it had been suggested Lily might apply for work there. Self-education, no matter how broad, did not carry one nearly as far in this time as a degree from university, so Lily was ready to resort to honest labor to support herself. Besides, though she had not John’s gift for learning the languages of beasts, she had spent enough years with him to be at ease in caring for them. Animals had not changed, in nearly two centuries, so it was a natural fit.

When she had her feet well under her, then she could seek out a scientist who might help her determine how she had come here, and how, or whether, she could ever return. For now, she needed to visit the library again and research how to conduct oneself when requesting employment. If she hurried, perhaps she would have time for more personal studies. She had sought out what information she could find about her time; young queen Victoria had had a long and eventful reign, given her name to an age in fact. Word of the estate she had granted John was sparse, and word, when Lily dared seek it at last, of John himself equally so. It appeared he had withdrawn from public life altogether. She couldn’t even find a confirmed date of death, though the ones cited agreed he had lived only a handful of years beyond her loss. Lily had fled the quiet walls of the library then, unable to bear more. 

She would not read of that today. Instead, she would perhaps read some of the Persian love poems she and John had loved. Or she might range even farther afield, and learn more about earth’s recent unpleasantness. The gentle green ogre called Hulk fascinated her, as did his brother in arms, the genius smith Anthony Stark, who had lost an arm and very nearly his life wielding the monstrous Thanos’ own weapons to end him.

So deep in her own thoughts was she that she failed to hear swift footfalls pound behind her on the sidewalk, until a body struck her. With an oof, she fell, and a small form snatched at her bag and made as to run. Lily scrambled up, set her feet and gripped the handle to arrest his flight. The little urchin yelped and swore, grabbing for his pocket and pulling out what looked like the butt of a flintlock pistol. _So, shall I end this way?_ she thought in a burst of anger. _I think not!_

She reached for her knife to slash the purse strap free, but was interrupted by a shout of “Uh-uh, punk!” Something shot past her and struck the pickpocket—it looked like the webbing of some mammoth spider, as it whipped around him and held him bound. Yelling, he tried to run, but a second shot wrapped his ankles and he fell on his face to the macadam. Lily braced herself before she spun to see what fresh hell awaited her, but it was no giant creature, only a slim figure garbed in red and blue, face masked. The vision tsk’ed and pulled her purse from the cutpurse’s flailing hand. “Back on your bullshit. You’d think people’d remember to be nice to each other!” With a flourish, her bag was presented to her. “Sorry, lady. You okay?”

“I, um, yes, I am, thank you. May I ask who I’m thanking, though?”

“Oh! You must be new in town. Just call me your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.”

The voice was that of a young man, eager and a bit awkward. Lily liked him. “Well, Spider-Man, may I compensate you for your timely assistance?”

She reached into her purse. “Aw, that’s not, y’know, necessary…although a hot dog would be great about now,” he added with a tilt of his cowled head toward a vendor on the corner. 

So that was how Lily Rassouli Dolittle, pirate princess and adventurer, found herself sitting in a park on West 46th Street in Manhattan, eating frankfurters with a boy calling himself Spider-Man. Her would-be robber swung gently in the breeze, dangling by his web-bound ankles from one of the three trees planted in the green space no bigger than a spread kerchief, and complained loudly. “You could have had a sausage of your own, if you had only asked, rather than trying to take what was not yours,” she informed the rascal tartly. “Quiet now, and think on the consequences of your actions.”

Spider-Man (more like Spider-Boy, she thought to herself) cackled. “I bet you’re a good mom. My aun—um, I mean, I know people who’d appreciate that. Mad scolding skills.”

His aunt. Had the lad no parents, then? If an aunt raised him, did she know what he was about, or was she blissfully ignorant? Lily didn’t know which to wish for her. “I am no ‘mom’, but your praise is duly noted.”

She did make sure the boy finished his food and drink, then saw him off, swinging from one building to the next and hauling the still griping little thief like a bug on a string. The pause had refreshed her, the young hero had restored her composure, and she now thought of another errand she wanted to complete. Joey had taught her the mysteries of cell phones, and helped her pick out a ‘burner’ (the kind smugglers nowadays used, he confided, which secretly amused her); now she used it to navigate to a stationer’s shop the next street over. There, she passed a pleasant hour picking out a leather notebook and being introduced to the marvel that was the modern fountain pen. How brilliant, to not have to dip one’s nib constantly in a bottle of ink, itself at risk of spilling every time a ship rolled in high seas, just to write a few lines!

From her earliest years, Lily had kept a written account of her adventures, be they childish raids on the larder late at night, a girl’s crushes, or the wonder of watching a man converse with an ape while she fell in love (with the man, not the ape, though Chee-Chee had become a dear friend who she missed dreadfully). Since her leap through time, she had chronicled on whatever bit of paper came to hand, with a child’s pencil if need be; but this, now, felt right, a blend of her old life and this new one. 

That night, she sat by the splendid glow of an electric bulb, copied her scribbled notes into the new journal in a fair hand, and then continued: _Dearest John, it eases my heart, just a bit, to pen my log in the form of letters to you, even knowing you shall never read them. This world is more amazing than any yarn spun about the lands of Faerie. The city has few beasts, so you would miss talking to them, but it seems to have folk who adopt some of their manners. Today I met a lad in a mask, who climbed and spun like a spider. He was a good boy. You would have liked him, I am sure._

Lily and her new job got on famously. She vacated the premises of Carlos and Consuela, though promising regular visitation, and taken a room with her new co-worker. Folk called New York the melting pot; she could see why, and felt she blended in quite well. The only bother was that her tummy seemed more sensitive to modern foods than it had been upon her first arrival. It was vexing to feel nauseous nearly every day. Despite her bringing up much of what she ate, she seemed to be gaining weight, and another trip to purchase clothing was time taken away from more valuable pursuits.

“Lilia,” Elena asked one night, “when were you gonna tell anybody you were pregnant?”

A few days later, after a trip to the neighborhood clinic, Lily took up her pen again. _My dear, dear John, I pined for my wedding ring, and wished I had something to remember you by. It seems I have brought something more of you than I could have dreamt, into this mad new world. Can you imagine me, the rowdy girl I once was, bearing a babe? By God, I would that you were here, to hold him, or her—whichever, you would love that child with all your great heart, I know you would. (Is it shameful that I want a boy? A little boy with your wild hair and huge eyes and quick mind?) I promise, beloved, whoever emerges, I shall give them all the love I can, all the love of mine that is yours. I will work as hard as I can to raise them up well, and be a credit to you, though you shall never see them. I will not say goodbye to you. ‘Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.’_

+++

_5 years later_

Who would have ever thought, back in Tony Stark's wild playboy days, that Take Your Child To Work Day would become his favorite holiday of the year? Morgan babbled from the passenger seat as they wended their way out of the city and back toward home, so excited about all the things the crew at SI R&D had let her get her hands on. Granted, they might not be as advanced as the projects in the garage behind the lake house, but they were different. More importantly, perhaps, she had gotten to spend an entire day as part of a team. Tony had never regretted his and Pep’s decision to homeschool their little genius, but he was starting to feel a twinge of concern about her social growth. If he had had a more normal childhood, maybe he would have been better equipped to be an Avenger. That was one more mistake he refused to repeat. He and Pepper needed to talk about getting Morg more chances to hang with real people. Rather than dictate a text to FRIDAY (it just seemed rude to talk about his kid like this with her present. _See, Pep, manners are trainable!_ ) he engaged auto-drive, pulled out his phone and started to type. He really needed to finish that touch-screen to install in the next version of his arm—

His train of thought was derailed when a snappy roadster blazed past, going entirely too fast for this road. He spared a thought, as his hands closed on the wheel even though FRI had everything under control, for how that had been him back in the day. “Wow!” Morgan said. 

“Speed has its place,” Tony agreed, “but this ain’t it. A narrow country road like this? Too much chance of sh-stuff happening.”

Morgan gave him her best preteen eyeroll. “You can say _shit_ , dad. I understood a long time ago that mom doesn’t have exclusive rights to it, no matter what you said.” He snorted, but before he could summon a snarky reply, her giggle turned into a gasp. “Dad! They hit something. See?”

His eyes flicked up the road just in time to spot a small dark object slide across the road like a hockey puck. It spun once, then lay still; only briefly though, and then, more horribly, it began to move slightly, as though struggling to get out of the line of oncoming vehicles, which, at the moment, was them. “It’s alive!” Morgan almost screamed. “They hit something alive, and they—why didn’t they stop?”

Tony hit the brakes and pulled into the nearest parking lot (it was the mom-and-pop Mexican joint they occasionally ordered from), his mind already racing. After nearly ten years of fatherhood, every time he thought he’d seen it all, some new predicament left him feeling as ignorant as the day Pepper had handed him for the first time the tiny human they had made. Witnessing roadkill was not one he had contemplated, yet here he was, about to have to comfort his daughter over—

A kitten. It was a scrap of black fur with enormous eyes, fighting to stand with one back leg splayed out uselessly. With a squeak, Morgan dropped to her knees and scooped it up before Tony could hit her with any of the dad-things that needed to be said in a moment like this, like _don’t touch it, it might bite or scratch, you don’t know what diseases it might have_. “Can we keep her, dad? You can fix her, right?”

Tony squatted beside her. “I’m not a vet, Morgoona. It’s probably hurt internally, and trying to keep it alive would hurt it more than, um, the alternative.”

“Dr. Abadi is a vet!” she retorted, and of course, she had a point; she was her mother’s child, so she was never going to be short on facts to back up her arguments. The local animal doctor was, Tony suspected, better versed in horses and alpacas (the reason they knew her—she came out periodically to trim Gerald’s nails and teeth, an adventure in itself) than hit-and-run kittens. Her hospital was nearby, though, and if bad news had to be given, Tony decided to be a wuss and foist that duty off on a professional. As if trying to make its own argument, the kitten let out a high-pitched mew and attempted to climb into Morgan’s hoodie. “Ow, hold still, I’m working on it. Daddy, please! We can’t just let her die.”

Parenting had taught him what Pepper and Rhodey meant when they accused him of aggressive deployment of Bambi eyes. “Okay. Just—understand, the news may not be good. it may not be what you want.”

Morgan looked down at the bit of fluff now trying to crawl under her shirt, petted it tentatively, and flinched when it squeaked in pain. “I just want her to not hurt,” she sniffled. “Whatever it takes.”

 _Fuck, you had to go there, kid._ “All right. C’mon, Good Sam, we’ll see if somebody can take a look at your dust bunny.”

The reception area was empty when they arrived at the vet clinic. “Ding dong, Avon calling,” Tony called as they entered. “Hello? Candygram? Landshark?”

He glanced to the side to check on Morgan, who, red-eyed, held the kitten close to her chest, and scratched at his hair. it needed a trim, but Pepper insisted she loved the unruly curls it got with a little length, and weirder yet, she swore she would dump him if he ever dyed it again. Tony couldn’t see the appeal, but as long as she kept calling him her silver fox, he was down with it. “Yes, coming, hallo, how can I—” The lightly accented female voice ended in a gasp, and Tony looked up quickly, finding a woman behind the reception desk staring at him as if seeing a ghost. Or a freak, he supposed, and fought the urge to raise his hand to hide his scarred cheek. Not like that would help minimize the freak factor; it was the prosthetic hand, after all. “Oh,” she said the next moment and relaxed; he guessed she recognized him now, from media coverage if nothing else. 

He slapped on his best media smile. “Sorry, is there another entrance for emergencies?” The woman shook her head and he moved in with hand out. “Tony Stark. My family’s demon alpaca Gerald is a patient of Dr. Abadi’s. Fortunately, we aren’t hauling him in. Is the doctor around?” At her rapid blinks, he got a little concerned. “Did we frighten you? I forget I’m kind of shocking to new people—"

“No, it’s not that, at all. You just—” She gestured at her face and he gritted his teeth to keep the smile in place and not go off in front of Morgan, until the woman surprised him by finishing, “You reminded me of my…late husband, that’s all.” She shook herself off and clasped his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Stark. Dr. Abadi is out on a house call. I’m Lily, her office manager. Who needs treatment?”

“Queso does!” Morgan said urgently and thrust the displeased little scruff at the woman.

“Queso, is it?” she smiled down.

“Queso?” Tony asked.

“Dad! She was outside Las Primas, and their queso is the best, so, yeah.”

“Oh, excuse me, your highness,” Tony snorted, and let her explain the incident. Lily scowled at hearing about the hit-and-run, commiserated with Morgan’s concern, and gently took the foundling with a promise to make the kitten comfortable until the vet returned.

The thump of small feet sounded from farther back in the clinic, and a tiny boy with wild curly hair appeared in the doorway to the reception area. “ _Mamán!_ Porter wants a snack.”

“Tell Porter that supper will be served in a bit, he’ll be fine, he’ll spoil his appetite, and yes, I know you want a snack too and the same applies to you.” The boy pouted and retreated. Tony chuckled; Lily glanced up at his laugh, and a small smile graced her face. “My son, J.W.”

“You’ve got much better resistance to the weaponized pout than I ever had with this one,” he returned and ruffled Morgan’s hair. The responding groan was almost audible; at almost ten, she thought she was a grown-up. She exacted a pledge from Lily to call them with updates immediately, and Tony shepherded her out to the car to get home before supper was cold.

True to her word, Lily called the next day. The kitten was surprisingly intact, with no internal injuries, and healthy except for needing shots, deworming, and some good meals. The exception was the one leg, crushed by the heedless speeder; it was unlikely to heal, and would be best off removed, according to the vet. Morgan cried for a few minutes, then brightened. “You built an arm for yourself, Dad, you can build her a leg!”

He’d never done animal work, but he was short on technical challenges at the moment. “Oh, why not,” he muttered and gave the okay for the surgery. “Guess we have an amputee cat now, Pep,” he informed his CEO, who did not seem as put out as he might have expected.

The family, in various permutations, visited the veterinary clinic several times during Queso’s recovery (Tony had tried unsuccessfully to suggest a name change, so Queso it would be). To all the Starks’ amusement, Lily’s boy, who apparently spent a lot of time at work with her, insisted the kitten liked her new name just fine. In full grown-up mode, Morgan humored J.W., and Pepper thought it was adorable that he played pet whisperer. Tony remained neutral, until the child informed him gravely that out of appreciation for his kindness, Queso would like for her new leg to be red and gold like his arm, please and thank you. Despite himself, Tony almost blushed.

When the cat was ready for discharge, Lily offered to bring her home. The chickens needed checkups and deworming anyway. She also brought her son, and while doing her medical duties (Tony learned she was more than the mere office manager she had modestly introduced herself as; she was a licensed vet tech), little J.W. helped Morgan settle Queso in her ridiculously soft cat bed. Tony half wished he had popcorn for the show, as the little boy meowed at the kitten, listened to its response, then earnestly ‘translated’. According to him, Queso was very excited to start work on her new leg, and promised to be as cooperative as possible. Morgan, to her credit, took it all seriously; once her pet was dozing she grabbed J.W. and hauled him outside. “Can you talk to chickens? What about alpacas? Come tell me what they say, okay?”

The adults settled at the breakfast bar, over coffee and a fresh loaf of Tony’s chocolate chip banana bread (he wasn’t the greatest househusband, but practice had improved his skills. Pepper was especially proud of his baking and loved to show him off to visitors). Lily was sharp and pleasant, and seemed unimpressed by the Stark name, or Iron Man pedigree. They didn’t invite people who were too impressed to the lake house, even for professional purposes. Tony was too careful for that. She didn’t talk a lot about herself, but Tony could tell she was smart and well-traveled. When, as parents tend to do, their conversation turned to their children, she opened up, but only a little. Her reticence caused an itch in the back of his brain, and it got scratched when Pep asked Lily about being a single mom raising a son.

“I wasn’t alone. I had friends who took me in and helped me along, and I keep in contact with them, though they live in the city. When the chance for this job presented itself, I could not let it pass. My… husband cared for animals, and I felt a need to give J.W. a chance to know the things his father had loved. I grew up without a mother myself. It made me a wild girl, but my father and his, um, partners in crime, you might say, doted on me. On the whole, it was no bad childhood.” She sipped her coffee. “Papa disapproved of my marriage, though. I hope he and my John made peace,” she went on more quietly, “after, ah, I was gone.”

Unbidden, Tony’s brain did the math. “You were snapped,” he said. “Blipped. Whatever the hell the media calls it. And your dad and husband both died before you came back.”

Lily’s mouth opened, but everything froze for a minute. Tony could not fight a pang of guilt, for yet another life he had impacted without meaning to, for this woman who had been left a pregnant widow. He was frozen by the accusation he fancied he saw in her eyes. Beside him, he felt Pepper move, her hand going for his. Before anyone could speak again, the silence was broken by the slam of the outside door and the giggles of a small child; J.W. scampered in and tried to climb the stool his mother sat on. The spell was snapped, Lily turned her full attention to her son, and Tony looked down, angry with life for the way that, no matter how hard he tried, the mistakes he made kept coming back to bite him.

He wallowed in self-loathing for a couple of seconds, until Pepper’s voice drew him back from his sneakers; not directed at him, but at their daughter. “What is it, Morgan?” she asked.

“Dad?” Morgan said quietly. That brought Tony’s focus up and fixed on her. It was a tone he couldn’t recall ever having heard from her before, and her expression matched it: disappointed, angry, shaken? He couldn’t put a finger on it, other than it was profoundly unsettling to see on his baby girl’s face and hear in her voice. She didn’t continue immediately, instead looking away at where Lily sat, with J.W. now in her lap. The boy was chattering in clear delight about something the chickens had said. “Remember how you always told me not to tell everybody about Uncle Thor and the Guardians, because it was private, which made sense, because most people don’t get visitors from space.” She tilted her head toward the mother and son. “You told them, though. Why?”

Tony blinked. “Um, no, honey, I never told anybody other than the family and our close friends. Not strangers, or even professional acquaintances, which is what Ms. Islanio is. What made you think otherwise?”

“J.W said Gerald wished the blue girl would come back and play.” Morgan fixed Tony with a glare that came straight from her mother. “How’d he know about Nebula, if you didn’t tell? and how come you can tell people stuff, and I can’t?”

While Tony tried to parse this mystery, Lily clearly sensed the change in the atmosphere. “Right, then. I expect we should get back to the surgery before Dr. Abadi thinks we’ve gone for pirates finally, don’t you, sweet boy? Oh my word, look at the chocolate on your face—”

“What? That’s what chocolate is for,” Tony got out with a fake-hearty grin at the boy. “Right, short stack? Morgoona says you and our evil walking yarn ball out there had quite a chat. He didn’t tell you any family secrets, did he?”

J.W. shook his head energetically. “He says when spaceships land here, they make a lot of noise. If they come when he’s trying to nap, it makes him mad. He kicked a hole in his stall door one time, ‘cause you didn’t understand.” He leaned alarmingly far out of his mother’s lap and dropped his voice to a child’s version of a whisper. “I dunno whether to believe him or not. Do you really have spaceships?”

Forcing his shock down, Tony gave a quick nod. “Don’t tell anybody though, okay? Our space friends don’t want TV cameras in their faces when they come visit.” 

At his eager head bob of agreement, Pepper cut in. “Morgan, why don’t you take J.W. upstairs to the bathroom and clean him up so he doesn’t make a mess of the clinic van?” With a telling glare and a pout worthy of her younger self, Morgan obeyed. Tony watched them go, finding himself oddly saddened by the casual fearlessness of the little boy’s words. If his suspicions were correct, J.W’s mother was going to have to teach him some fear, and soon. “So,” he said, feigning a calm he didn’t feel, “when did you know that he was a mutant?” 

“I beg your pardon?” Her turns of phrase were oddly old-fashioned and English, and reminded Tony a little of growing up under Jarvis’ wing.

“The talking to animals thing. Unless he can read minds, that is. We know, it’s been reported over the past couple of years, that kids who were _in utero_ when their moms blipped and then came back are exhibiting—powers, talents, whatever—as they get older.” Tony leaned forward and caught Lily’s wide-eyed gaze with his. “We also know there is some, backlash, I guess you could say: opposition, prejudice. Fear, really. I’ve seen some shit, online especially.” He moved his eyes away to give a significant look toward the stairs. “He’s a cute kid, obviously a good kid. You keeping him with you all the time works now, but when he goes to school, he’ll have to learn who he can trust with this, and how to manage it. I’m not saying I’m the one to do the teaching. That’s your job, and your found family’s, maybe, if you trust them with it. I’m saying, we aren’t going to tell anybody, and I’ve—got a little experience in mentoring, not that I set out to get said experience…” He let out a frustrated little huff. “We can help you out, that’s all.”

Lily stared at him for a moment as though he were speaking Wakandan. “I…no. I mean, I appreciate your offer, but you are mistaken. J.W.’s father had the knack. It seemed self-evident to me that he inherited it thus.”

Tony gulped. “That’s what I get for assuming,” he finally got out. “Weird, though. The squishy sciences aren’t my forte, but I’ve never heard of anybody who could share a bitch session with a camelid—”

“I have,” Pepper suddenly spoke up. “One case was mentioned in a deep-dive British history class I took in college. Everybody laughed; I don’t think anybody believed it. Early in the Victorian era, I think.”

The other woman audibly caught her breath. “I’ve searched on the internet with no success. Have you any records of it?”

“The textbook’s long out of print, I’m sure, but I think I actually kept it.” Pepper got up and went to browse the bookshelves in the den. Tony tried to think of what else to say, and decided for once in his life to just shut up. In a moment, Pep returned flipping through a worn old volume headed A MOST PECULIAR HISTORY. “Here it is. Huh, he might be your husband’s ancestor, Lily—you said Tony reminded you of him, and I do see a little resemblance.”

Tony smothered a chuckle at the over-the-top portrait on the page, of a dark-haired man dressed in full-on comic-opera military regalia, dripping with medals and epaulets and all, with several small animals crawling over him. _Must have been one hell of a veterinarian_ , he thought. The caption identified the subject as Doctor John William Dolittle, and the portrait as having been commissioned by the young Queen Victoria after he treated her for a severe illness and exposed a plot against her. At least the expression, if the artist captured it right, indicated the guy was not impressed with himself at all. “I never knew the British Empire resorted to banana-republic levels of commendation—more fruit salad on that jacket than on every buffet in the Catskills—”

A small noise of surprise stopped him mid-snark. Lily had one hand over her mouth, eyes wide, while the other reached toward the picture, her fingers brushing across the page. “I hadn’t seen this,” she said softly. “It must have been painted after I…” 

She might have finished the thought, if the children rushing back downstairs hadn’t interrupted. J.W. bounced over to his mother, but halted at the look on her face. “ _Mamán_! What’s wrong?” He glared around like he would take on every grown-up in the room for her. “Did they make you cry?”

“No! No, _mi pequeno_ , not at all.” Lily hugged the boy tight. Pepper’s eyes flicked to Tony’s, communicating without words as she did so well her sudden concern. Morgan came to her dad, a frown on her brow, not knowing where the tension in the room came from but plainly sensing it all the same. 

The boy wriggled around in his mom’s arms, and peered at the book lying in front of her. “Who’s that?”

“That…that, _moosh moosh-am,_ is your papa.” She looked up at Tony and Pepper, with a shaky smile. “I have heard the reports about children being—different, about how they are hurt, called out, shunned, and yes, I take great care with my little one. But he is not one of them, and this is how I know. Everyone I know assumes, as you did, that I was ‘blipped’, but I was not. I—I don’t know exactly how I came to be here, but this is not my place or my time. Do not think me mad, I beg of you.”

Pepper was the one who recovered first, and actually let out a small laugh. “If you think this is the craziest thing we’ve ever heard, think again,” she said sincerely with a pat to Lily’s arm. “Why don’t you explain, first, and then we’ll decide how crazy we think you are.”

“Yeah,” Tony managed. “What she said.”

They moved to the more comfortable den, where Lily proceeded to tell her story, which, compared to some things they had seen, really wasn’t all that crazy. “What your pals were saying,” Tony said, “about people dropping into dangerous places after the return, or coming back later, or with their minds messed up—those weren’t actually people who blipped to begin with. The public doesn’t know it, but we’ve figured out that the multiple uses of the Infinity Stones has worn some weak spots in the time-space continuum, like the way clothes wear thin after a while and eventually, holes appear. There’s a lot of disruption around those holes. The unexplained sudden storm you described could have been accompanying one of them.”

“But they aren’t holes in time, you say.” Tony had to hand it to her, as wild as her circumstance was, she was listening intently, and he could almost see the wheels turning behind her eyes. Morgan, thank fuck, had taken J.W. off to play; she was the best kid ever born, he really needed to double her trust fund or something. “I didn’t move from my past to my future, then. I came here from—another universe? That sounds mad even to me.”

“No kidding. I’ve been there, though. Odds are, you came in from another timeline.”

“And in this timeline, Lily Dolittle was never found, and her John died not long after her.” Her finger brushed across the page of Pepper’s old textbook again, now lying open in her lap. “But in my timeline, he may not have. He—he may still be alive.” The hand dropped to her lap, limp. “Not that it matters, unless I could miraculously happen upon another of these holes, that by happenstance connected back to my universe.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. No offense.” Tony grinned and ignored Pepper’s startled glance. “It’s not general knowledge, but if you’re considering heading back to the days of old queen Vicky, you won’t be telling anybody around here anyway. Part of the way we beat Thanos involved learning how to access some other timelines. If I can get enough data about yours, I might— _might_ , not making any promises here—be able to get you back there. If this time isn’t good enough for you, that is,” he added with a wink.

“If—Oh, this time is wonderful. Your scientific advances are amazing. No one bats an eyelash when I walk down the high street in trousers. Less illness, the stars within reach, and icy cold beer at will! Not exactly Utopia, but not as wrongheaded as my own place and time, in many ways. And yet…” Lily’s eyes shifted, focused over Tony’s shoulder into some distance only she could see. “As you say, my boy would face prejudice here, and assumptions about who and what he was. Back home, I can protect him--we can. When John and I wed, we swore never willingly to part. I would have him raise his son, if it is within the realm of the possible.”

Beside Tony, Pepper’s tense posture suddenly eased. “If it can be done, Tony can do it,” she assured the other woman, and Tony nearly fell off the sofa. The time heist gear had been dismantled and stored away in several locations, to keep anyone (not him, certainly) from going off half-cocked and using it for some trivial purpose. It was their fault this woman was in this predicament, though; his fault, in a way, and he felt a duty to right the wrong. Against that, he felt the weight of the pledge he had made to Pepper, that he had hung up his spurs for good. Looking at her, however, he saw something there he hadn’t seen before. 

He had done a few turns in the suit since modifying it to accommodate his prosthetic arm, gone out on some rescue missions and the like. Nothing like this, though, and even as he had spoken the words, Tony had expected to see Pepper’s face take on that tight smile that said _I know you feel you have to do this, Tony, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it._ Instead, she nodded, and what she said next explained the difference. “I know what it feels like to think you’ve lost the person you love most in the world. It feels like you’ve lost part of yourself.”

The women's eyes met. Lily nodded, then clasped her hands together. “ _'Never lose hope, my heart, miracles dwell in the invisible!'_ ” she said with a genuine smile. “You say you need data, Mr. Stark. What do you need, and can I provide you any assistance?”

“Um, well, yeah, any particulars about your timeline, historical events, dates and places and names, anything that could help me narrow down which slot your tab fits into.”

She held up a finger and raced outside. In a moment she returned with a leather-bound journal she handed to Tony. “As I tried to research this time, I began to find oddities, differences between the history your folk have recorded and events as I recall learning of, and even seeing in some instances. I assumed they were caused by flaws in the passing down and documenting, but now, knowing of this ‘multiverse’, those may be clues that will lead you to my home. I’ve written them all down.”

“Kicking it old school. Works for me.” Tony nodded with a smile he hoped was reassuring. 

“I trust,” she went on, less briskly, “you will consider the softness of my heart, contained herein. The entries are written in the format of letters to my husband, and as such, I waxed…emotional, at times.”

Tony still wasn’t the greatest hand at handling emotion, but he had come a long way. “Your secrets are safe with me, Doctor. Allons-y!”

She laughed. “Oh, I understand that reference! My friends made note of my accent, and directed me to the BBC programs. Television is incredible stuff. Sometimes. At any rate, yes, _Doctor Who_ is quite delightful.”

“Sixty-five years on the air this fall, who’da thunk it?” With a flourish, Tony tucked the journal under his arm. “Prepare to decamp, madame!”

Lily’s documentation was meticulous and impressive. Within a couple of days, Tony had collated enough data points to set a space-time GPS for the general timeline she had come from. He pulled her back in and put her to work with FRIDAY’s assistance to pinpoint specific locations by latitude and longitude. She was open-mouthed at the holo-tech maps and charts, for all of a minute or two, before she dove in. “Electricity,” she mumbled, still awe-struck.

That gave Tony a chance to talk to Pepper. “I know, honey, we haven’t taken any of the other misplaced people back, but we haven’t had the intel to be sure we were putting them back where they came from. Or we haven’t gotten to them in time and they were freaked out and hiding, like that one fella. Or—remember the woman who didn’t want to go back?”

“Tony,” Pepper shushed him, “I get it. You have the opportunity to set things right for her, and you want to do it. You’ve used the tech, other people have used the tech, that’s not an issue. Just try not to get yourself into trouble. Please.”

“Trouble? Who, me?”

“I could go,” an unexpected voice chimed in. Turning, Tony saw Morgan with her jaw set in a way he only saw when he looked in a mirror at the wrong time. “You’ve told me enough stories about the time heist. I understand how it works. I could help!”

He didn’t want to talk down to her, to squash her tough little spirit. “There’s too many unknowns on this mission, Morgoona. I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking even an adult on their first jump into this situation. Besides, your mom’s got a lot on her plate, and I need somebody reliable, with a keen eye, to keep watch over the gear: make sure one of your uncle Scott’s bugs doesn’t fly into it, Gerald doesn’t chew up the power cord, that sort of thing.” He sat down and patted his knee, but she kept stubbornly standing. It made him smile. “You’ve more than done your part, wrangling the kid. I’m so proud of you.” 

That got him a sudden fierce hug. “Still wanna go,” she grumbled. 

“They also serve who only stand and wait. You’re an important part of this project, honey.”

Gathering the components to reassemble the equipment for timeline-jumping took some time, and Tony couldn’t very well pull it off without letting a few people in on the plan. That was the idea of spreading them out, to force the prospective user to take the time to think through their actions. Some were in his garage, and a few in a storage unit at SI’s West Coast HQ. Tony sent Happy to get those, and quietly encouraged him to take May and make a weekend of it. Peter was staying at college that weekend, probably doing something similar with his MJ, though Tony tried not to think about his spiderling in that kind of situation; it made his dad-brain flip.

Most of the more cumbersome pieces were shrunk and living in a shoebox in Scott Lang’s garage (“What? Hide ‘em in plain sight, Stark!”). In the aftermath of the final battle, he and Tony had found common ground in parenthood, and stayed in regular touch. Tony knew a good story about a parent in need would win Lang’s assistance, and he wasn’t wrong. What he wasn’t so sure about was getting enough Pym particles to do the jumps, with extras for emergencies. Turned out, whatever Howard had done to piss Hank Pym off decades ago, he had forgiven Tony for, and the call of a child separated from his dad was apparently just as irresistible to the old guy as to Scott; on the designated morning, both men turned up at the lake house with the shoebox in tow, and proceeded to take over Tony’s back yard to enlarge and reassemble the apparatus.

Fabricating a child-sized quantum suit felt frankly eerie. Lily, too, admitted her qualms. “My guiding principle has always been ‘embrace the unknown, and the answers will be revealed’. That’s all well and good for myself, but for J.W., I—how is it you say it now—I can’t not feel some apprehension.”

“Just makes you a normal parent,” Tony reassured her. “Me, I’d be more worried he’d have a fit when you tell him no more Disney movies or Pokemon Ultimate.”

The next decisions were exactly where on Lily’s earth they should land, and when. The when was already determined, to some extent. Some experimentation with previous holes in the multiverse had revealed that they created a sort of ripple effect, and that trying to reopen them too soon risked ripping an uncontrolled rift in the continuum. The GPS would have to be set to leave a cushion of time between Lily’s fall and her return, a good number of months at least. Tony regretted it; he remembered the way he had hurt like his chest was torn open again, when he thought Pepper was gone, fallen to her death in flames, even though it was only a few minutes. He hated to leave Lily’s John thinking her dead for much longer, but there wasn’t another option. Once again, Pepper reassured him. “Not much longer than that, if possible," she told him. "But that long…if he loves her that much, he’ll hold out that long.”

With the time frame fixed, more debate ensued over the target location. Lily’s voyage, she explained, had been to locate an island spoken of in the tales of her father’s pirate band (and how damn cool was it to be working with a real-life pirate king’s daughter, when the closest Tony had ever gotten was conning Rhodey into joining him in going for MIT’s pirate certification?) and she thought going there first might be a good idea. “I was the first person to collect all the stories and try to chart a route to Edentree Island. John knew whence I was bound, of course, so it's reasonable he could have attempted to retrace my steps in search of my ship.” With that in mind, Tony set her and FRIDAY to work reconstructing that route so he could pinpoint latitude and longitude. Despite having nothing to start with but her own memories, she studied modern charts and holographic projections, and pieced it together. He could only imagine what she might have been able to accomplish with modern gear at her disposal.

Once done, though, she expressed concern about dropping on a deserted island with no way to get off. Tony teased her at first by offering to shrink a small ship, though he admitted he had no experience beyond that long-ago (and half-drunk, most of the time) college physical education program. She gave him a disapproving look that rivaled Pepper’s, so he gave up the effort, and explained how they could jump from place to place using the Pym particles. After all, he reasoned to himself, they’d sent Rogers off with six Infinity Stones in a briefcase, and he had jumped from timeline to timeline, and come back in thirty seconds of objective time. A jump or two, pre-programmed into the GPS watches for quick reference, shouldn’t be hard, though with a child with them they would naturally keep those to a minimum. 

Lily worked out the coordinates, as well as those for another island, Monteverde. In this timeline, it was a historical site and tourist attraction; in hers, it was her childhood home, and she confessed she’d like to visit her father if possible. Tony plugged them in, then trained her in using the watch to activate and deactivate the nanites that formed the suit. J.W. watched, and wanted to handle his own, so Tony gave him a little training too, and was pleasantly shocked at how quickly the kid caught on, though he would still need help.

Pepper and Morgan pitched in to help with period-accurate wardrobe, but Lily looked at the dresses she had procured as if they had a disease. “Not you too!” Lily groaned. “How, pray tell, would any rational person expect me to ride a camel across a desert or scale the Great Wall of the Chinese Emperor in _skirts_?” After Pepper recovered from a fit of laughter, she corrected her approach by getting Lily in front of a laptop and having her pick out the clothes she wanted. 

They also, less excitingly (from Tony’s perspective) picked out vintage clothes for him. On the target morning, he felt like he was suiting up to be an extra in a Sherlock Holmes play: dress shirt and vest, trousers with suspenders, coat and boots and gloves to hide his prosthetic. “The Game’s afoot, Watson! Fetch me my magnifying glass and my hash pipe. Want me to investigate you in this getup, when I get back? I’ll only be gone a minute or so, from this side. Leaves us all day to play.”

Pepper playfully swatted his attempted kisses away. “Concentrate on your job first.” She caught his face in her hands, her fingers stroking the scars on his cheek in the way only she could. “I’ll be your Irene Adler later.”

“Eh, Adler, Watson, he was probably doing ‘em both.” Tony grinned, then sobered. “Thank you, Potts. For, y’know, putting up with me.” He still, sometimes, didn’t quite understand how or why she did, but her gentle yet strong kiss said all he needed to know. 

“Ew.” Morgan stood in their bedroom doorway glaring. “Uncle Scott said for me to come get you two before you started _canoodling_ and forgot what you were supposed to do.”

They looked at each other and laughed all the way downstairs, reining in their amusement only when they stepped out of the house and saw the multiverse rig set up in the yard and humming with energy. Pepper halted; Tony squeezed her hand in reassurance, though his own gut was roiling with nerves. The last time he had stepped onto that platform, his life had changed forever before the end of the day. Did he have the actual nerve to pull this off? He had to.

Morgan had run on ahead to where Lang stood looking over the control board. Tony took a deep breath, let go of Pepper’s hand and reached for his best media-ready manner as he followed. “I’ve assigned my most trusted assistant to ride herd on you, Lang,” he mock-warned.

Scott’s answering grin bore none of the caustic anger of their first real meeting, separated by the glass wall of a cell on the Raft so long ago. “I’ll do my best to earn a good report,” he said earnestly, with a fond grin down at Morgan. He had lost five years of watching his own daughter grow up, so Tony figured he could spare the guy the loan of his occasionally.

“Where’s Pym?” Tony asked, and Scott jerked his head toward where the older man stood talking with Lily. She had a small leather satchel slung over her shoulder and J.W.’s hand clasped in hers. 

“May I say,” Hank was saying when Tony tromped over, “that it has been a joy to meet you, Mrs. Dolittle, and I have no doubt if you stayed here you could become one of the most notable minds of our time.”

“Ant-daddy’s right,” Tony agreed, ignoring Pym’s grimace. “Last chance to cop out and spend your life in the land of indoor plumbing.”

“We have indoor plumbing, thank you very much, good sir!” Lily declared with an air of affront that Tony knew was completely faked. “And Professor Pym, the joy is all mine.”

Pym stepped back. “Safe journey to you and your little man,” he wished her, then added, “though considering the company you’re keeping, it may not be an uneventful one. Stark has a nose for trouble. Or it has a nose for him. I’m not quite sure which.”

“I assure you, I can safeguard my own wellbeing, and that of anyone accompanying me,” she affirmed. Tony didn’t doubt that either. He’d always had a knack for drawing kick-ass females into his life. Though he suppressed a snicker imagining her seeing Iron Man in the flesh, or nano-stuff, he suspected she could lop off a head or two if they got in her way.

He lifted J.W. onto the platform and helped get the tiny helmet shut, then gave a big grin and thumbs-up, before he gave Lily a hand up and made sure she was ready too. “Be right back!” he called to Morgan, who waved, and Pepper, who from her folded-arm stance was tense and trying not to show it. 

At the control array, Pym flipped a switch, the platform glowed beneath their feet, and hands clasped, they were hurled into the Quantum Realm, the vortex of color dizzying as it swirled around them. Tony shifted into flight posture as easily as breathing, and had just enough time to see that both his companions had done the same, before their feet hit ground. Tony retracted his helmet; the air around them was tinged with salt, and unbelievably fresh. This was the air of an earth that hadn’t yet been overwhelmed by machinery, by smoke and soot and pollution. He swallowed, gripped by a sudden fierce sadness, until it was dispelled by a glad little cry.

Turning, he saw Lily’s helmet retracted and her face aglow as she looked around. “Edentree Island…I was right,” she breathed, “It was exactly where I calculated it to be.”

“The island?” Tony demanded. “Wait, you _weren’t sure_??”

“Of course I was sure. I am who I am, after all.” He gaped as she busied herself doffing her quantum suit and helping J.W. with his gear. If this was what dealing with him was like, he owed Pepper a lifetime’s worth of apologies, as well as nearly everybody else he knew. “Come, let’s look for signs of other landings here recently.” 

They stood on a narrow rocky beach, at the foot of a fair-sized mountain. Tony dismissed his suit, straightened his antiquated clothes and followed her, griping as he went. “Now wait a minute, I’m not your Sherpa. Mountain climbing isn’t in my skill set. I normally fly to the top, a lot less wear and tear on the old joints.” 

She paused, and looked back at him with a dawning light in her eyes. “You…yes, you could. But did you shrink your armor, as you threatened to do with a ship?”

With a small smirk, he slid a hand into his shirt and tapped the nanite housing attached to his chest. The suit slithered out and over him, and now he couldn’t hold back a small sigh of comfort. Becoming Iron Man felt like home, even in another timeline without FRIDAY. “Where are we heading?” he asked, enjoying the way J.W.’s big dark eyes grew until they took up most of his little face.

“We should take a turn around the coastline, then look deeper if no trace of human visitation is apparent. The map I constructed from reports pointed to the center of this mountain as the location of the Eden tree. That's where anyone would have gone, and left traces of their passing.” Center of the mountain…Tony got a suspicion, and a quick scan confirmed it; the mountain was an extinct volcano. The island was tiny, and it only took him a few minutes to make an airborne circuit, but no signs of life showed. Two quick hops later, they were inside. J.W. rode piggyback on Tony, and Lily led the way through a grotto lit by sunlight filtering down through the broken top of the cone. “Foxfire rocks,” she said, pointing to a faintly luminous trail of fungus. “We must be close.”

At the heart of the dead volcano, the rich soil eroded from the leftover lava flow was home to an amazing variety of bizarre and beautiful plants. Tony couldn’t help but imagine Pepper here having a botanical-gasm. Near the center, a tall twisting tree rose toward the heavens. “This is it,” Lily said, her voice hushed. “The Eden tree. Its fruit is said to cure every malady known to man, grant eternal life, even restore the hair on your head. I daresay, Mr. Stark, it might turn your silver locks dark again.”

“No thanks, my wife likes it this way.” J.W. giggled from his perch and tugged at Tony’s hair. it was a good thing he hadn’t gotten around to cutting it; the longer style would let him fit into the timeline for however long he spent.

Lily walked around the tree’s massive trunk, looking up, but then sighed. “It seems to be past bearing season, though. Unless someone picked it first…” She took a few more steps, then stopped and stared down at her boot—or, no, at the ground beside her foot. She knelt, brushed aside some moss, and stood, holding something shiny. Tony walked over. In her shaking hand, she clasped a thin neck chain, with two simple bands strung on it, one larger than the other. “Our rings,” she whispered. “Mine, and John's. How…why…I don’t understand.”

Tony was not good at giving comfort, but he was about to give it a go, as Jarvis had always said, when a weighty rustle was followed by a grunt and a roar that made the stone around them ring. Spinning, he looked up—and up—and up, at a lizard-like creature so tall its neck and head nearly blocked the sparse light from outside. “You didn’t tell me you had fucking _dragons_ here,” he growled while suiting up.

“I didn’t know we did!” she yelled back. Tony lifted off but hovered just a few feet off the ground to determine which way the monster was going to jump. Going high and striking at the head was logical, but that left Lily and J.W. unguarded. With a gulp he glanced down and around till he spotted the boy in his mother’s arms. The lizard—no, fuck it, call it what it was, a dragon—roared again, and Tony would have sworn a lick of fire squirted out of its gaping jaws. He didn’t move, though. Getting killed by a genocidal alien warlord wielding the powers of the universe, and living to tell about it, made a guy less stressed out later on about the small stuff. Like fucking dragons.

The next roar was not quite as loud, and seemed more shaped, like speech. The dragon looked right at him when that happened—Tony blurred his visuals for a moment, just in case it had some fairy-tale power like turning people to stone, though they hadn’t seen any weirdly realistic statues hanging around the grotto. It looked down at the other two then and emitted a slightly different roar. Lily was tight, her eyes darting around as if looking for a weapon, but her son cocked his head in a listening pose. Then, wouldn’t you know it, he let out some roaring noises in response; tiny and cute like a cartoon lion cub, but roars all the same.

The dragon reared back as though shocked out of its scales. They exchanged strings of growls and grumbles, while Tony dropped back to the ground and retracted his helmet to give Lily a look of disbelief. “He is his father’s son,” she shrugged. “What does he say, dear?”

“She,” their small interpreter corrected his mother. “She’s a girl. Her name is Ginko.” He looked over at Tony. “She wanted to know how come you weren’t scared of her. I told her you were a hero and you saved the whole world.”

“Well, _a_ world,” Tony said modestly, or as modestly as a Stark knew how.

“And she says you can’t have those rings, _mamán_. Somebody gave them to her to guard.”

“This one is mine,” Lily replied stoutly. “Whoever gave them to her…this one is mine.” She undid the chain, ignoring a renewed roar, and slipped the smaller one onto her ring finger, her lip trembling but her hand now steady. It fit perfectly. 

“Can you ask,” Tony said, “who gave her the rings, and when?”

After a few more rounds of snarls and rumbles, J.W. said, “She says it was the last human people that she talked to. She thinks it’s funny, she hadn’t met a people she could talk to in a hundred years, and then she met two. I’m the second one!” He held up two little fingers in pride. “The man that gave ‘em to her could talk to her too. She was sick and he made her better.” Heedless of Lily’s little gasp, he went on, “He knew somebody sick, and she gave him a fruit off of this tree to make ‘em better, ‘cause he was nice to her. She was sad, ‘cause her—” His round face screwed up in thought and he made another little growl. The dragon’s head was almost on the ground now, and while it—whoops, she--seemed totally taken with the child, Tony kept his guard up. She crooned a few rumbles in return, and J.W. brightened. “Oh yeah. She was sad ‘cause her mate died. I dunno what that is. But the man she talked to, his mate died too, so he understood. That’s why you can’t have those, they b’long to him and his mate.” With the fearlessness of childhood, he stepped closer still and began to scratch the top of the huge head. “It itches,” he explained. “Claws aren’t good for scratchin’ your head, I guess. So she said I could make myself useful.”

The dragon’s sigh nearly knocked the child off his feet, and her enormous eyes drifted to one side briefly. Tony followed her line of sight and nearly fell over himself at the sight of a huge skull, clearly of the same species. Fuck, had she had to stay here all this time, alone, with the remains of…He had never thought himself emo, but in his old age things got to him more. Ginko’s gaze locked onto him again; this time he returned her regard and nodded his head in understanding.

Tears streaked down Lily’s face, but her stance was resolute. “Tell her…tell her, please, that this is my ring, and I believe that the man who left them here is my-my husband. My mate. He thought me dead. Is he alive, still, and does she know where he is?”

“He left an’ went back to where he came from,” J.W. reported, “with a buncha animals and a boy.” The dragon’s eyes rolled toward Tony. “He looked kinda like Mr. Stark, only not as old.”

“Give me a complex, why don’t you,” Tony groused under his breath. “Just kidding!” he added hastily when she glared as though she comprehended his snark. 

“So John was alive then.” Lily was thinking aloud. “But he must have found no trace of my ship, to have given up on me.” She clasped the chain around her neck, and ran her fingers along it. “This looks well worn. Poly reached him safely with it, then, and it has been some time, as you said, Mr. Stark.”

“Couldn’t be helped,” he offered, “but yeah, still sorry about that. Let’s get a move on, now that we’ve got a lead.”

He took a step forward, but Ginko the dragon swung her head around and blocked him, growling with a whiff of smoke trailing from one nostril. He couldn’t help but stare in fascination despite the obvious risks, or maybe because of them. He’d always been reckless, and an idiot for science, after all. “She says we got to promise not to tell anybody where she is,” J.W. chirped. “The tree is real important, and she’s gotta pro-tect it.”

Lily pledged her silence instantly. “Not my world, so immaterial, but yeah,” Tony agreed.

“An’ she wants you to help her with somethin’, Mr. Stark,” the child went on, “’cause you’re littler than her, and you got magic armor. I tried to tell her about science, but she doesn’t get it.”

“At least you tried, short stack,” Tony said with approval, then addressed the dragon directly; decades of dealing across language barriers in business had taught him to talk to the other party, not the translator. “As long as you aren’t planning to have us for dinner, Norberta, I can give you a hand. Lead the way.”

The way went from the garden into another chamber, piled higher than their heads with—stuff. _It’s an actual fucking hoard_ , Tony thought in awe: piles of weapons, full suits of knightly armor, a set of bagpipes piled against one wall (it stank, none of them got very close), and coins and loose gemstones scattered around carelessly. Along the base of one wall, water trickled at the bottom of a crease in the stone. Instantly alert, Tony followed the dribble to where it disappeared into the rock, and saw a small slide, enough to block the flow but far too fine for the dragon’s big paws to move. “Ahh. I got this.” He suited up and dropped into the channel, where it was the work of only a few moments’ repulsor fire to dislodge the blockage. The icy cold water gushed free, reminding Tony of laying cable beneath the East River to take Stark Tower off the grid, long ago.

The dragon was thrilled—the stream was both her drinking and washing water and hydrated the big tree and the garden around it—and she offered them whatever they wanted from her hoard. Lily paid the heaps of valuables no mind, instead striding through and assessing a succession of bladed hardware. “Knives are passable, but sometimes one does not wish to draw that close to a potential foe.” Before Tony blinked twice, she whipped out half a dozen short blades from nowhere, and he suddenly missed Romanoff more than he had in years. 

J.W. found a box of metal toys and plopped down to deploy them on the ground. Tony walked slowly around the chamber, wondering if these were the spoils leftover from shipwrecks or the dragon’s meals. He shook back a shiver, his fingers creeping into his shirt to brush against the nanite housing. Just out of curiosity, he picked up a small leather case with a shoulder strap that contained several tin tubes with cork stoppers, securely packed into loops. “Huh. BYO condiments? Smuggle budgies?”

“A specimen case,” Lily said from beside him. She held a slim, wicked-looking blade with the ease of somebody who had used them a lot. “Ginko, love, did you eat a _scientist?”_

The dragon almost looked embarrassed, and her growls lowered to a mumble. “She didn’t know it was a scientist, till after she ate him,” J.W. explained. “Wow. I wanna see you eat somebody!”

“No you don’t, pint-size, considering it’d have to be one of us,” Tony pointed out.

Lily slid the sword into a sheath buckled around her waist and urged her son up, brushing dirt off his pants with the sigh Tony had heard ten thousand times from Pepper. “She says she forgot how it was nice to have visitors, when they’re not trying to kill you,” the boy translated another rumble.

“Big mood,” Tony muttered, with a grin to himself as he envisioned the look of resignation he always got from Peter when he deployed ‘shit you kids say’. 

The massive head lifted and the dragon vocalized directly at him. “What’re you gonna take, Mr. Stark?” J.W. asked. “Ginko says you can get a bunch of jewels in that bag and get rich.”

“I’m already rich enough, no offense. And I was willing to waive my usual consulting fee, but who am I to argue with a dragon?” Suddenly he had a thought. “My, um, mate, she likes plants. You’ve got some here that don’t grow back my way. Could I cut a few slips to take to her? I can put ‘em in the bento box here.”

The dragon’s eyes widened and she all but clapped her huge forepaws. “She likes that!” the kid said. “She says it’s extra special that you want somethin’ for your mate instead of you.” Tony tensed a fraction when the big creature leaned close, inhaled the air around him, then breathed a light puff of brimstone-scented air onto the bag he clutched. Following Ginko’s directions, Tony used one of Lily’s knives to take cuttings of several of the more intriguing growths and seal them into the tubes with a warning not to open them until he returned home. He doubted they would keep, but it was worth a try.

That done, they said goodbye to their giant host. Tony replenished the Pym particles, they suited up, and jumped again. This time, following Lily’s second set of coordinates, they landed on a beach below a bustling small town, near piers where boats of various sizes were coming and going. “I thought it best to aim for a location I recall was not overly busy,” she explained. “As a wild girl, I slipped off here to kiss my boyfriends.”

“No kissing,” Tony joked. “You aren’t getting me into trouble, pirate princess. I’m a happily married man.”

“And I a happily married woman, or so I hope, so fear not.” She tried to keep her tone light, but Tony noticed her touch the ring on her finger, then clasp the larger one on its chain around her neck. The ache of sympathy for her, not knowing if her John was alive, and knowing he had given her up for dead, was real. After a moment’s quiet, she seemed to shake the mood off and surveyed the immediate area. “Yon folk may raise an alarm at our approach, not having seen us disembark from any ship. I suggest we start for my father’s quarters, and I shall keep watch for any of his people that I knew.”

They started to walk along the seawall, Lily pointing out various sights and telling J.W. tales about her childhood, until, seemingly from nowhere, they were cut off by a semicircle of ferocious-looking rough customers, weapons in hand. Tony braced to fend them off, and J.W. looked ready to fly at them to protect his mother, but Lily didn’t blink. “Balthier! How good to see you again, dear heart. How is your old papa faring? Odette, have you made an honest man of Silvertooth yet? And Rodman Steele, that fair lad with you cannot be your son! Why, he was barely waist-high when last I saw him!”

She turned the charm on in a snap, reminding Tony of his own days in the public eye. Their confronters were rocked back on their heels; he could see the belligerence morphing into confusion. Hesitantly, a couple spoke up. “Lily?” said the grey-ponytailed man she had called Rodman Steele. “We heard you were lost at sea. The men your father sent seeking found naught but your journal—”

A disruption in the back of the group cut him short. The small crowd still gathering parted, and another man strode through. He was thin, wiry and leathery brown, dressed in worn canvas pants and a coat draped in extravagant gold braid and swag. His stubbled chin and close-cropped hair were grey, but Tony had no doubt the guy could kick the ass of every fighter twice his size standing there. He stomped to a halt before Lily and eyed her warily. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“I hoped you might be glad to see me alive,” Lily sighed. “So did you not release your vow to disown me, papa? I know, you said I was dead to you when I left with John, but once you thought me truly dead, you could not forgive me even then? Well enough, then. I wanted only to see you again, and to—”

She was cut off when with a sudden gasp the old man lunged at her, but only to wrap her in his arms and cry out her name. “I should have known. If any mortal could spit in the Dutchman’s eye it was you, my fierce beloved girl.”

“Papa…” Her steadfast voice finally trembled, and she returned his embrace. “Oh, papa. I feared I would never see you again, or walk Monteverde’s paths!” She pulled back, but only far enough to smile into the old man’s face. “Dare I ask, if you have had any word from John? It seems he searched for me as well.”

“Ah, him,” the old pirate grumped. “Yes, yes, I have seen him. That’s a tale in itself; for now, suffice it to say he was well when last we parted. I still don’t like him, mind you!”

Lily smiled through tears. “You don’t have to like him, papa, for I love him.”

With another resounding humph, he spied Tony and stormed over. “And who have we here?” His gaze felt almost like fingernails scraping over the scars on Tony’s cheek, and he lifted his chin and gave his best Tony-Fucking-Stark glare in return.

“A friend,” Lily said. “He and his wife aided me in my return.” She leaned into the word _wife_ , and Tony could have kissed her for it, except that would have pretty much shitcanned what she was trying to do. “Mr. Stark, may I present my father, Parvaz Rassouli, lord of Monteverde and past king of the Brethren Court of the Sea. Papa, this is Anthony Stark, inventor, of New York City in America.”

None of that did much to diminish the hairy eyeball Tony was getting. “I see no ship,” Rassouli challenged. “How came you here?”

Tony scratched the back of his neck, his mind racing. The guy’s attitude reminded him a bit of Thor, when they first met, so he decided to handle him as such. “Well,” he drawled, “I could tell you, Calico Jack, but then I’d have to kill you, and then your daughter would probably shish kebob me on her sword, if fifteen men on the dead man’s chest didn’t beat her to it, and that would suck for both of us. So, let’s just not go there, all right?”

The pirate king’s glare intensified—then he burst into a raucous laugh and slapped Tony on the shoulder (the left one, fortunately). Tony breathed a sigh of relief that his skills at reading a room hadn’t failed him. “Americans! Your speech is even more odd than I had heard. Very well, I suppose I should let you live to return to your wife. And who is this? Your son and cabin boy?” he added when he looked down where J.W. was clinging to Tony’s hand.

Lily took a deep breath. “Not Mr. Stark’s son, no. This is your grandson. John William Dolittle Jr.”

Rassouli’s eyes widened. “Is that so?” Slowly, he crouched to eye level with the boy. “Are you frightened, lad?”

To his credit, J.W. straightened and let go of Tony, with a full dose of his mother’s courage. “A little,” he squeaked.

“Mmm. And yet you face me. A truly brave soul admits when they are afraid, but does not let it rule them.” The old pirate put out his hand. “Will you greet your old grandpapa?” The boy’s eyes flew to Lily, who nodded with an unsteady smile. Hesitantly, he reached out and his little fingers wrapped around Rassouli’s work-toughened ones. The man’s smile turned to a scowl when he glanced over his shoulder at the gawking throng. “Well?” he roared. “Off with you, you lazy lot! Scour the great hall, light a fire under the kitchen staff, tonight we feast and celebrate!” Oh yeah, Tony thought as they were hauled off to clean up and dress in the wildest gear ever seen, this place definitely reminded him of visiting New Asgard. 

His only regret in the wild rumpus that followed was that he was there alone; he wished Rhodey could be here to join him in being real pirates for a night. Natasha would have loved it too, played every knife-throwing game to win and drunk every man jack of them under the long tables. Hell, Fury should have been there—they would have had him fitted for an appropriate eye patch by the time the last of the residents staggered out singing. Tony himself drank a couple of rounds of their surprisingly good homebrew, sampled every weird delicacy that passed by, and deflected questions about his scars. It was oddly nice, though, how forthright this crew was, how they simply accepted that the scars were won in battle and gave him respect without judgement.

Instead of being seen to a bed for the night, he and his companions were whisked off to the pirate king’s ridiculously opulent personal quarters, where Rassouli demanded the truth. “I can count, girl. You have been gone less than a year. I know you too well to think you would have set sail for parts unknown with a babe barely out of his nappies beside you, nor that, for all his flaws, Dolittle would have allowed it; so you had not this child before.”

“It…As they say in America, it’s a long story, papa, and I think Mr. Stark better suited to tell it than I.”

Tony and Lily had discussed it and settled on a cover story for general consumption, and the easiest way to explain something close to the actual facts to those who needed to know those. With the floor handed over, he explained as simply as he could that Lily had been caught in the backwash of an experiment in time travel, conducted nearly two hundred years in the future. She had spent nearly five years there, before he had accompanied her and her son, born during those years, back to their time. 

Rassouli started to scoff and swear, but Tony didn’t give him time to get started before he tossed his coat aside (after the effort Pepper put out to find it online, she would kill him if he did much more than get it dusty), pulled off one glove and rolled up his right sleeve to display his prosthetic arm. “You don’t have tech like this, Dread Roberts, not anywhere in this time. Your daughter busted her ass to get back here and let you meet your grandson. If you aren’t grateful, you can fucking pretend you are.” With an effort, Tony reined in his temper. “No, it doesn’t detach,” he lied when he saw the calculating look in the pirate king’s eye, “and if you mess with it, they’ll be finding bits of you on Madagascar, so don’t even think about it.”

“You have a daughter,” Rassouli surprised him by saying after a moment of dead silence. “You speak too fervently, to not be a father who has known the pain of losing a girl-child, or at the very least, the fear of it.” Tony only trusted himself to give a curt nod in reply; this had unexpectedly stirred up old ghosts, memories of the moments in the ruins of the Avengers’ compound when he had known he was dying, known he would never see Morgan grow up. “I feel nothing but gratitude, to God for gifts this old man does not deserve, to my fair Lily for honoring her stubborn ass of a father, and to you, Anthony Stark, for your kindness to a stranger.”

With Tony feeling less at risk of being skewered in his sleep, Lily questioned her father about his encounter with her husband. In short, Rassouli explained, John Dolittle had come to steal Lily’s journal, which her grieving father had kept, to use her notes to reconstruct her route to Edentree Island and procure its fruit to use to treat a mysterious illness of the young queen. In his own world, Tony recalled from Pepper’s book, their Dolittle had treated Victoria too, though he didn’t imagine it had involved a voyage to Skull Island with a larcenous layover among retirees from Captain Jack Sparrow’s crew.

Rassouli glossed over the visit, but it was pretty obvious he and Dolittle had clashed, though he admitted to ultimately giving the man her notes. (From the sound of things, it seemed the doctor’s crew of animals had wrecked some of the village too; the pirate king even asked if Tony could help repair a large gate that something had torn out. Surely he didn’t mean ‘polar bear’ when he said ‘polar bear’.) “I half expected never to see or hear from him again,” Lily’s father told her, “especially considering this equally lunatic fellow Mudfly was racing him to the tree; but some days after, our lookouts spied a ship, and well, what do you know, ‘twas him and his mad band.” From a locked drawer in an ornate desk, he removed a well-worn leather book. “He returned it.” Rassouli’s tone spoke of his bafflement. “He said he wished for me to keep it in my care.”

While Lily flipped through the pages with a smile, the old pirate turned his attention to J.W., who was apparently snuggled in a corner making quiet sounds to himself, sprawled on a spotted fur pillow. At least, that was what Tony assumed, until the pillow…moved, stretched long legs, and lifted a yellow-eyed head to yawn and meow loudly. The boy giggled and meowed back. “Sahel likes him. It seems he has inherited his father’s gift,” Rassouli said softly.

“Seems like it’s more a knack for picking up languages, not something magical,” Tony offered and tried to repress a shiver. Fucking magic. 

The old man grunted, and summoned a boy to show them to rooms for the night. Tony inspected the space; for all the seeming plushness, he didn’t want to take ancient fleas from another timeline back home. It was surprisingly clean, though, and it did have indoor plumbing. Why the fuck didn’t his ancient history professor tell them that, he wondered as he bedded down in hopes of getting some sleep.

The next day, while Rassouli got acquainted with his grandson, Tony joined a pair of sturdy teenage boys to fix the gate. By the time they were done, he had reworked the latch and smoothed out the hinges. The kids, who reminded him entirely too much of Parker and Keener, took unfair advantage of him, and hauled him all over the island from one limping bit of equipment to the next. He wasn’t about to admit it but playing with primitive tech was both stimulating and soothing.

His host was delighted with the results. “You are a wizard with your hands, Stark, and have earned my regard and payment. An enchanted bauble from my trove, perhaps?”

Tony winced. “Fuckin’ magic? No thanks. I mean, no offense, but I hate magic. I appreciate the gesture, I really do, it’s just…” He waved his hands, words failing him for once.

The pirate’s sharp gaze scrutinized him, before he surprised Tony with a slow nod. “It’s about those scars you bear, is it not? The same battle that cost you your arm?”

“Damn near my life too, if it hadn’t been for my wife.”

Rassouli smiled broadly. “Is it not often so, that we men owe so much that is good in our lives to the women in it?” Tony chuckled in agreement, a bit taken aback to find such understanding so far from home. 

The pirates offered a small ship and crew to sail to England, but it would take longer to get there than Lily or Tony wanted to spend (she to get back to her man, he to not get seasick in front of a gang of pirates, nice enough though they might be. He still had his pride, after all). The three prepared for their final jump, though Lily promised her father to return as soon as she was able. “I would not have it said I let so skilled a craftsman serve me without recompense,” Rassouli told Tony and pressed upon him several pair of hand-stitched gloves made of thin fine leather. He knew how to accept a gift and be gracious about it, and they might come in handy here, too. He put them both on before engaging the quantum suit—he’d be damned if he would let himself be the one who gave this verse’s Michael Jackson any ideas.

One more hop, and they stood in a shady country lane. A line of people snaked ahead, wearing everything from fancy military dress to worn farmer’s gear. Tony couldn’t help thinking of the time Parker blackmailed him into taking the kids to Comic Con; his brain processed it as cosplayers waiting to get into some big franchise’s panel. Lily made a pleased sound when they walked past some of the queue and saw they were going through a wide gate. The sign beside it said: DOLITTLE & APPRENTICE, ALL SPECIES WELCOME. WILL ALSO CONSIDER FAR-FLUNG VOYAGES AND MAGICAL ADVENTURES. INQUIRE WITHIN. “That sounds promising,” she said with a hint of a smile. “Come, this way.”

Magical adventures didn’t sound very damn promising to Tony, but this wasn’t his circus, so he followed her around the fenced wall, to a narrow gate that opened onto a wide swath of green grass. A short way in the distance sat a manor house, nothing Kardassian-level, but definitely comfortable enough for this time. That in itself would have been reassuring, if a rhinoceros hadn’t been grazing there, and an ostrich hadn’t been bouncing around pecking here and there. The latter peeped loudly upon spying them and rushed them. Tony reached to push the kid and his mom behind them, not that he knew exactly what in the hell he could do to a charging bird the size of a small dinosaur that wouldn’t injure it or him; but Lily said, “Plimpton! How lovely to see you again. You’ve grown those lost feathers back. Ah, you look so striking!”

The big thing stopped and squawked. J.W. squinted, then giggled, “He says he thought you drownded!” 

“I’m harder to lose than that!” Lily laughed and resumed her stroll toward the house. The bird squawked again and started to run ahead. “Plimpton, no, don’t go and tell everyone, I want to surprise them! Come back and stay with your friend. Humberto, isn’t it?”

The rhino looked up, grunted, and returned to his vegetation. “Plimpton says Humberto’s got a tummyache, and the doctor told him not to get excited,” J.W. informed them while the bird stalked away. “So he isn’t, and that is very boring.”

“Trust me, pal, boring beats the alternative,” Tony tossed in the rhino’s general direction as he passed. “Damn, now you’ve got me talking to them. Gerald’s gonna think I’ve lost my mind. Again.”

They reached the house, but Lily shushed them and led them around to a side window instead of straight to the front door. In a large room inside, a man and a young boy seemed busy treating a menagerie, assisted by, well, a menagerie. The boy quacked, and a white duck waddled up with a stalk of celery in her mouth; the man glanced over, sighed, and quacked. The duck actually hung its head, trudged off and returned in a moment with a paper sack. The man clearly stifled a groan. “Stubbins, Dab-Dab is plainly off her mark today. Hand me those forceps, won’t you, there’s a good lad.”

“My word,” Lily whispered. “John’s managed to teach his apprentice to speak with them.” She chuckled. “But of course he has. Oh, my darling…” Tony had seen the look on her face, directed at him by Pepper for years now. He still wasn’t sure what he had done to deserve it, but by now he had stopped arguing. “Well, come along, then…J.W.?”

They looked around, but the boy was gone. With a suddenly sinking stomach, Tony looked back inside the manor house and spied their quarry, chatting away at a sloth, with a grin that split his little face wide. About the same time, Dolittle looked up from his work (bandaging the tiny paw of a hedgehog) and spied the new arrival. He wiped his hands and walked over. “Hallo, young man,” he greeted him. “have you brought us a patient?”

“No. I’m looking for my papa. My _mamán_ said we’d find him here.”

“Indeed, did she now? And who might you be, sir?” 

“I’m J.W.,” the boy said proudly.

Tony and Lily didn’t stick around to hear the rest. They dashed for the door and burst into the treatment area. Lily rolled in like a tall ship under full sail and headed straight for the doctor who was frozen in his worn boots. “I perceive that holds some significance to you,” she snapped, “as do these.” Her ring was back on the chain around her neck, with its mate, and she thrust them in his face. “Or rather they did, seeing as how you left them buried under a tree!”

“A special tree!” Dolittle fired back. Tony wondered if he was running on autopilot; he looked pale enough to fall over, but his scowl and shout said he was letting basic emotions take over in a moment of shock. “A very special tree!”

“A special tree, granted, but a tree. Our vows meant no more to you than that? You gave up on me, and more to the point, you gave up on yourself. It took a child, and the animals and fucking Blair Mudfly, to drag you back into the world. Disgraceful, I say. _Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because—”_

“ _’Because for those who love with heart and soul,_ ” Dolittle finished, “ _there is no such thing as separation_.’” The man was visibly gasping for breath. Tony could empathize; it wasn’t easy when reality hit, be it bad or good, when it was the last thing you expected. “If I have finally gone mad, I welcome that madness, if it comes in your form. If I have dropped dead and am in hell, I shall embrace that too, if my doom is to face condemnation wearing your face for eternity.” He reached toward Lily, his hands shaky, stopping and starting, and he gasped aloud when they closed around her fingers clutching the rings. “Lily…can this be?”

Tony saw the guy’s knees buckle before the guy himself probably knew it. He started forward to lend a hand, but saw something more pressing in the moment: J.W., backing up with a look of confusion. Kicking into parent mode, he caught hold of the little one. Reassuring him was a good excuse for Tony to look away, anyhow—feelings still weren’t his strong suit, for all that Pepper insisted his years of parenting and pseudo-parenting had changed that.

Thankfully, Tony didn’t have to wrangle the child alone. While Lily bent over her wayward husband, stroking his hair and talking softly and crying as much as Dolittle was, the teenage assistant stepped up. “Um, hallo,” he offered. “I’m the doctor’s apprentice, Stubbins.”

As Tony introduced himself, he heard a noise nearby. Despite his certainty that Rassouli had fabricated his story of how his town gate got wrecked, there really was a fucking polar bear standing next to the kid. It wore a Peruvian chullo hat, and a baffled expression that was as clear to read as a bear could be, he supposed. It cocked its head and made a series of grunts and growls that Tony, though with no pretensions to being an animal whisperer, would have sworn on the collected works of Ada Lovelace translated to _what the fuck_. “I dunno either, Yoshi,” Stubbins replied.

“You talk to ‘em too?” J.W. said with delight. 

The apprentice brightened, his frown of concern gone. “I do! C’mon, I’ll introduce you round. This is Yoshi. He’s a big chap, but don’t let that put you off, he’s a right delight.” 

Tony sighed with relief, reminded of the knack Peter had swiftly developed for swooping in and carting Morgan off to swing in a web hammock or play some crazy game he made up on the spur of the moment, when she got upset during her daddy's long rehab.

Right now, with that task delegating itself, he found himself faced with a beaming wet-eyed Lily and her spouse, who seemed to have regained himself enough to start another argument. “My dear, I may treat animals, but I _did_ graduate medical school and I _am_ conversant with all human physical parameters, and despite the tyke’s obvious resemblance to me, the math—”

“Oh, bugger the math, John. Mr. Stark, I fear I must call upon your genius one last time for explanation,” Lily sighed, but this time with an indulgent smile at Dolittle, who finally took a good look at Tony then. 

“There! You see, Lily? The lad could as easily belong to this elderly gent’s family line—”

“Elderly? Watch your mouth, Joe Exotic. And thank Saint Francis or whoever that my wife didn’t hear you say that, she’d own your zoo here and your ass to boot. You wouldn't have a zoo without an ass, now would you?” 

Tony gathered his thoughts and glanced around. The animals had fallen silent and looked for all the world as though they were watching the heartfelt reunion too, except for a squirrel standing on a nearby desk that was eyeing him. He wondered with a whiff of unease if squirrels could go rabid, and narrowed his eyes to look for any froth around its mouth. The damn thing put its paws on its hips and returned the glare, and Tony decided not to pursue any of this shit any farther than he had to. When it let loose with a string of sharp-toned chatter, Dolittle started as though shot. “Kevin!” he scolded. “Where on earth did you learn such language? And in front of a guest, no less. Tsk! Don’t you have work to be about?” The squirrel sat down on its ass, flicked its tail and somehow managed to sound exasperated. “No, I do not need to be protected from myself, though your concern is much appreciated. So!” The man clapped his hands. “A tale is in order here, apparently. Tea?”

“Coffee, if you’ve got it," Tony said.

“Hmph, Americans. Poly will know if there's any about. Poly!” 

A huge brightly feathered bird swooped down; Tony barely stifled the urge to duck, but Lily reacted with delight. “Poly was on my ship when we ran into that unnatural storm,” she told Tony. “I gave her my wedding band to take back to John.” Said ring was back on her hand, which Dolittle took and kissed with almost embarrassing fervor before exchanging squawks with the bird, who then flew off. 

The boy Stubbins and the polar bear brought chairs, and the bird returned riding on the shoulder of a gorilla carrying a tray with a tea pot, cups and a small French press of good coffee. _This is really happening, isn’t it?_ Tony thought. _I mean, did I fall off the garage roof last month when I was up there mending it, and hit my head? Maybe I’m hallucinating this whole thing._ He wasn’t and he knew that, but it was just too weird to stomach that this guy had trained these animals this well. _Wait, Stark. He doesn’t train them, he speaks their language. Thor doesn’t train you to do tricks, just because he speaks English and asks you to do something. Same principle._

Entirely too much to think about right now. Tony was definitely going to have to treat the animals in his life better henceforth, though. He thanked the gorilla, who looked thrilled. It all but skipped away, and Dolittle actually smiled. “Chee-Chee has some issues with his self-esteem. Your praise just now was a good job.”

“Hah. I feel you, MIghty Joe.” Tony resolutely set aside his personal feels, and once more laid out the basic story of Lily’s adventure and his assistance in her return. Somewhere during the exposition, a scruffy little dog ambled in and sniffed all around, including his ankles. Tony had just enough time to hope it didn’t pee on his shoe, when it gave a happy little yip, flopped down half on his foot, and promptly fell asleep.

Fortunately, for all his flaky exterior, Dolittle listened intently, did not mock, and asked a few sharp questions, then nodded and sat back. “I can’t say I would ever have guessed such things as time-travel could be, but as you explain them, they do make sense. It isn’t as if this one would ever lie to me, either,” he added and patted Lily’s knee where she sat glowing beside him.

In response, she opened the satchel she had been carrying throughout the journey and pulled out a book. At first, Tony thought it was her old journal that her father had kept, but this one looked more modern in make. She handed it to Dolittle with a smile. “You know me, always chronicling my adventures. These are written in the form of letters to you. A silly conceit, perhaps, but it…made me feel you were near, when I despaired of ever seeing you again.”

Another awkward moment of the couple staring into each other’s eyes was broken by Stubbins, who had also listened enrapt. “Do they have big trains in the future?” he asked.

“Huge,” Tony assured him.

“An’ cars!” J.W. exclaimed. “An’ computers, an’—”

“Now, now,” Lily shushed him gently. “Remember what we talked about? We can tell family about the future, but not everyone. We don’t want to spoil the surprise for them. Like hearing a story, and then telling everyone who hasn’t heard it how it ends!”

Tony could have argued the point, but it took him back to Strange’s words to him on the last battlefield: _if I tell you what happens, it won’t happen._ He suppressed a shudder and put on a happy face. “Okay! Well, since everybody is on the same page now, I need to get back across the pond and a couple of centuries. You got your story straight, princess?”

The cover story they had worked out for the rest of the world had just enough truth in it to make it sound legit. Lily had been washed overboard in a storm and picked up by a ship. Her memory lost to trauma (what? Soap operas didn’t exist yet, it wasn’t like anybody was going to know better) she had been taken to the nearest port, in America, and taken in by kind strangers. J.W. was an orphan she had adopted on her travels. When her memory returned, she had located her husband’s only living relative, a cousin in New York, who had helped her get home. With agreement all around, Tony gently nudged the dog so he could get up and collect the quantum suit watches. “Tell Morgan hi!” J.W. chirped. “An’ Miss Pepper, an’ Gerald an’ Queso.”

Lily hugged him and kissed his cheek, and Stubbins gave his best manly handshake. “Were I to live decades enough to see your time, Mr. Stark,” Dolittle said as he followed his apprentice's suit, “that would not be sufficient time to adequately express my thanks for the gifts you have brought me.”

Tony shrugged the thanks off. “Eh, been there, done that, got the t-shirt.”

“Shall I have to live another two hundred years to know exactly what that means?”

“Yep,” Tony nodded. “Appreciate your family, Tom Jones. You never know. You…just don’t.”

Dolittle gripped his shoulder, then let him go. The nerves roiling in his gut as he activated the suit and helmet were if anything worse than they had been at any point during this crazy trip. If Tony had been a praying person, he likely would have been doing it at the instant he slotted the vial of Pym particles in place and set off the reaction that shot him into the Quantum tunnel. He closed his eyes, this time, and didn’t open them until he felt his feet thunk down and heard a sweet little voice yell, “Yay!”

Morgan was not waiting eagerly beside the platform when Tony opened his eyes, though. Instead she was out over the lake, riding Lang’s giant pet insect. She was his child, though, so it stood to reason she wasn’t going to turn down a chance like that. Pepper was there, of course, and her smile was the release he needed as he half-stumbled off the rig and into her arms. “Mission accomplished,” he told her. 

“Good deal!” Pym actually sounded happy to see him, for once. “Janet called while you were gone. She and Hope flew into New York with us, and since it’ll take a few hours to disassemble and shrink this gear, she and Hope thought they might rent a car and bring up a picnic.”

“I’m giving myself a mental health day off,” Pepper informed him. “A picnic with my hero husband sounds lovely.” She lowered her voice. "And later on, perhaps the great detective can debauch The Woman in his life."

Tony grinned. “Works for me. Just another day in paradise.”

**Author's Note:**

> A few thoughts: a lot of theories have gone around regarding where people snapped by Thanos returned. My headcanon is that surely the Stones and Bruce combined had sense enough to not drop people into unsafe places, so that is the canon of this story. It fits into the Equilibrium verse that includes the other standalone stories Pepper Potts and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Iron Skins and Tender Hearts.
> 
> Another theory making the rounds is that the MCU may use aftereffects of the Snaps as a vehicle to bring mutants like the X-Men into their verse. I used that in here, when Tony assumes J.W. is one of the first of the new kids born post-Snap to be thus affected.
> 
> The movie Dolittle doesn't give a specific timeline, but Queen Victoria was born in 1819 and took the throne in 1837. To my eyes, in the film she looks to be in her twenties max, so it likely takes place somewhere in the late 1840s, hence Lily's thought that she has fallen nearly two hundred years forward in time.
> 
> Yes, Carlos' cousin Luis is exactly who you think he is. lol. Carlos and his wife assume Lily is an undocumented immigrant who met with foul play.
> 
> Rassouli is a Persian name. In this verse, Lily speaks Persian, French and Spanish fluently, as well as survival Chinese, an African dialect or two, and Inuit; those last three she picked up while adventuring with John. Her father made sure she was well schooled, probably by scholars he picked up in pirating, who he made deals with to educate her for a period of time in return for room and board and safe passage to their destination eventually. She uses words from several languages, especially terms of endearment for her son, like _mi pequeno_ , Spanish for my little one, and Persian _moosh moosh-ah_ , my little mouse. J.W. calls her _maman_ (French). She was particularly fond of the love poetry of Rumi, and felt it realized when she met and fell in love with John. Most of the quotes she uses in this story come from Rumi's works, although her 'embrace the unknown' line comes straight from canon.
> 
> MIT really does have a pirate certification program, in case you didn't know. It requires passing tests in archery, fencing, pistol or rifle, and sailing. Just imagine babies Tony and Rhodey taking those courses together! https://physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu/about/pirate-certificate/
> 
> As for Tony's undercover attire...yeah, just fill in your favorite image of Holmes. hehe. (fun fact: if my theory is correct and canon Lily is not dead, and John were to find her, it's theoretically possible for them to have a son who grew up to be Holmes. His grave marker at the end of Game of Shadows lists 1854 as his birth date, so within the window of possibility.)
> 
> ETA, I just realized I didn't mention the specimen bag that Ginko gave Tony! She put a spell of preservation on it, so when he opened it up, the cuttings he had taken for Pepper were still fresh and ready to be rooted.


End file.
